I’ve been having panic attacks for about 8 years now, and I never knew how long they lasted. That all changed about a week ago when I went running.

I have been limiting physical exertion of any kind for years now, since one of my panic attack symptoms turned into a trigger. Being unable to catch my breath would trigger a panic attack for me like clockwork. So exercise sort of went out the door.

Recently, I’ve been trying to change all of that. I’ve been on a walk-run program that will hopefully get me to run 5K with no breaks. Well, 6 weeks in, I finally felt great running. I got completely lost in it. That is until I realized that I got completely lost in it and had been running 10 minutes straight at a fairly fast pace for me.

And 10 seconds later I was having a panic attack. But this time I had Limbical with me. It took me about 5 seconds of fumbling to get my phone out and start Limbical, so we can add that time to my panic attack. But the bottom line is, 35 seconds after it started, I was OK.

35 seconds.

35 seconds I have been so afraid of.

And 35 seconds after that, I actually got back to running. Terrified, but I got back into it.